Robinson ends where I began, with some comments about Michelle’s method:
Now that I have covered Malkin’s central arguments as fallacious, I would like to step back and look at the work as a whole. I do appreciate the author’s willingness to take an unorthodox position, and it is good to put the wartime treatment of the Japanese Americans in perspective—I was not aware that GIs were housed in the stalls at Santa Anita after the Japanese Americans had been confined there. Still, Malkin’s book is not a useful work of history, but a polemic that relies for its attraction on sensationalism and overstatement. The author lumps everyone who has ever written on the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans into a single homogenous (and self-interested) group and does not discuss their different arguments, or indeed, their disagreements with each other. Such conspiratorial thinking detracts from the merit of what the author does get right. (A minor but indicative point: in one of the two places where my work BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT is cited, the author refers to me as “Canadian historian Greg Robinson.” Since the matter of my nationality has no relevance to the point at hand I can only interpret its inclusion as a subtle attempt at discrediting me as a foreigner—in fact I am a born and bred New Yorker, with undiluted fealty to my native land).
The work also suffers from the author’s perceptible shoddiness of method. Many of the author’s contentions, and particularly her generalizations about popular perceptions (such as that the government confiscated Japanese American property), are barren of footnotes. In her section on the MAGIC intercepts, the author takes over David Lowman’s work to the point of plagiarism. Not only does she cite the same MAGIC cables, she even indulges in the same selective quotation of sources such as Roberta Wohlstetter and John Costello in which Lowman indulged. For example, she cites military historian John Costello (p. 37) as saying that “The rising current of fear on the West Coast and the evidence from the MAGIC intercepts were important factors in the President’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066,” but fails to add Costello’s statement almost immediately after that sentence that Executive Order 9066, “enabled the military to start to round up 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans.” Thus the author ignores the fact that Costello regarded the Japanese Americans as victims, not instigators, of the Order.
Indeed, if I have been able to reply so quickly to Malkin’s contentions, it is because ALL the information she presents on MAGIC was featured in Lowman’s Congressional testimony twenty years ago, and were addressed in detail at that time. (Many of the MAGIC excerpts and testimony as to Japanese spies were old even then—they had first been made public in 1946, during the Congressional Committee investigation into the Pearl Harbor attack). The author also has a tendency to contradict herself. For example, she states that the opinion of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Japanese Americans was not reliable or relied upon, since he had no access to the MAGIC intercepts that she claims demonstrated spying by Japanese Americans. (In fact, Hoover received detailed summaries of MAGIC information from the Office of Naval Intelligence, whose members likewise opposed mass evacuation). On the other hand, she is quick to quote any negative comment on Japanese Americans by the FBI or the ONI. Similarly, she implies on pages 77 and 126 that the push for evacuation came from President Roosevelt, since McCloy told DeWitt that he had specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens. Yet on page 81 she states that FDR was too busy with directing the war effort to think of such matters, and properly delegated all decisions to Stimson.
I suspect that in some part these contradictions and this cutting and pasting come from the fact that book was written very quickly—the author herself says that she wrote it over a single year in her spare time (presumably not very plentiful, given her daily columns and other work in media). However, much of it clearly is a result of the author’s procrustean effort to stretch facts to fit an ideologically predetermined thesis. As a result, there are certain basic facts that Malkin dares not even touch. She does not explain why the Canadian government, whose leaders did not have the benefit of the MAGIC cables which “proved” the existence of Nisei espionage networks, nonetheless went through the process of relocating and incarcerating their ethnic Japanese residents. Furthermore, she does not explain why immediate loyalty hearings were not granted to people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or aliens, the way that they were to all other enemy aliens, just as they eventually were to Japanese Americans.
Most of all, the author does not deal at all with the long, extensive, and very well documented history of anti-Japanese-American racism on the West Coast. This absence is so glaring as to constitute bad faith on the part of the author. Malkin tries desperately to get around the question of racism by locating the entire decision in the White House, and in a vacuum. She must be aware that trying to discuss the process of evacuation without mentioning the long campaign by Californians to get rid of the “Japs” or the political pressure on the Administration from West Coast congressmen and commercial groups is unreal–like trying to discuss the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment without bringing in slavery.
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